


dying measurements

by moon_hedgehog



Category: The Glass Scientists (Webcomic), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
Genre: Character Study, Drabble Collection, M/M, all trigger warnings in the notes, but like. in different aus, obvi jekyde but still it's Henry-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:47:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25131880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moon_hedgehog/pseuds/moon_hedgehog
Summary: he has this fantasy of sorts, let’s call it a power fantasy; he wants to be good and shrink into a tiny black dot and then he wants to throw himself into the sun.
Kudos: 63





	1. reincarnations pt. I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **tw:** mild body horror
> 
> [this](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12916821/chapters/45061114) au

The road is windy here.  
  
It is all cracked like a bad-built ship, bare resemblances of trees tearing it open and making it bleed red clay. The suffocating skies embrace it, cup it like hands of a mother that strangles her child’s throat. This desert is silent and deadly and her whole heart wants to swallow the world.  
  
“What are you doing here, traveler?” a man asks, his beard gray and unkempt, his loneliness hiding in shoulders.  
  
Henry tilts his head and sighs, sand escaping his mouth. In limbo between matters of time and space, he tries to find a way out, but mostly he tries to remember. Hands. Tongues. Heartbeats. He tries to remember but he’s been here only that long, and the memories are still scattered all over this earth like mirages.  
  
“I’m looking for... someone. I died and I’m getting back to him.”  
  
Stillness once again hangs like a shawl. Here there is no need for water or food, no need for respite. Here there is only a windy road, those who have given up, and he. A voice calling him home. A love waiting in every lifetime.  
  
Henry lifts the corners of his lips in a smile and turns away and forward.


	2. reincarnations pt. II

Here’s the thing about war: it leaves bruises.  
  
They hide deep inside where no knife can reach, they cannot be carved out. Half of them are ugly and swollen and ready to burst with white rot; the other half is blue-violet-violent and it gets sucked into intestines. The first half is anger that shakes knuckles and grits teeth. The other half is pain, of a lamb led to a slaughterhouse.  
  
Henry knows both. But it is the pain that venoms him.  
  
It’s not all metaphorical. Sometimes his wings — those things that were sewn into him, things bloody and messy and torn — ache as if they’ve just now caught a bomb, as if they are ablaze. He looks at them with disgust, mostly tiredness. They remind he is not a human. Not anymore.  
  
And he shouldn’t be alive.  
  
That is exactly what he repeats himself in the dirty mirror. I shouldn’t be alive. I shouldn’t be alive. I shouldn’t be alive.  
  
Gentle hands on his neck but he shouldn’t be alive. Kisses over his hair but he shouldn’t be alive. He’s a patched spawn of a horrid tragedy and a test subject of a dire regime. He’s all gutted. He’s wrong.  
  
“You’re right,” loving words in his ear ~~but he shouldn’t be alive~~.


	3. fires pt. I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **tw:** abuse of (christian) religion, heavily implied child rape & rape talk overall, hinted forced feminization
> 
> cult au ♡

His first church, church in a small British town, offered blood. It offered knees on the broken cold tile, harshly religious school that required praying, and old crosses, golden paint skinned down. Most of all it offered blood - and got satisfied only with his own, spilled all over the floor in a tiny room. Once. Twice. Fifty times. And then he stopped counting.

 ****“I’m not gonna hurt you, little lamb,” their pastor whispered, pushing his legs apart. Hurting.

 **** **** ****“This is what God wants of you then,” mother harrumphed, still mourning the absence of girl-heir, not paying any attention to his words, his pleads. Painting his room in pink. **  
  
**“What the fuck are you talking about? No one’s gonna believe you,” students laughed, gritting their teeth in cruel grins. Abandoning. **  
  
**His first church offered blood. So much of it. Rivers of it under bathroom sinks, drops of it on the uniform, smears of it over teaching boards. It offered the absence of viridity. **  
  
**It hides in his dreams at night until he gets up and scrubs whole body raw and flushes it down the drain. **  
  
**His second church offers joy. Electricity on the tip of a syringe needle, sacrifices that are in pleasure, the feeling of safety coming with guns and armies. Most of all it offers joy and he’s bathing in it alongside with the light of his lover, his leader, his Christ. **  
  
**All these years he’s been trying to find a new religion that could glue back the bitten off, fragmented parts of his dirty flesh. All these years the answer was to create it. **  
  
**His second church offers joy. But it offers delusions, too. And Henry is full of them on his own.


	4. fires pt. II

Sometimes Henry visits it, wooden benches ate by termites, cheap altar with cheap wine and cheap icons. It is, too, placed near a school just like in his childhood, and it, too, smells of incense and blood. It, too, craves new flesh and new orisons and hands on the bones of its confessional booths. Hollow and hungry, it wants to be reborn and brought to original beauty. **  
  
**Sometimes Henry wishes to burn this place to the ground, insides - out, rot - out, oil - out; and leave its bare shell, its cascades, its ashes on the damp soil. It, once, ate him up; and eating is a good metaphor for religion, and starving is a good metaphor for his life. Bloodied thighs of a twelve-year-old boy is another good one, old small cross hanging from his neck is an even better. His life is full of them, metaphors for ache and force and sacrifices; this world is full of them **  
  
**And **  
  
**This world doesn’t want more rape poems. It desires glorification of pain. **  
  
**This world wants not his tears and his helplessness, him being frozen in time while his body is being violated (repeatedly, through years); him being obedient and silent and weak. He can’t be weak. For starters **  
  
**1) religion is love **  
  
**And **  
  
**2) boys don’t get defiled **  
  
**And **  
  
**3) not by pastors. **  
  
**This world wants him screaming and kicking and shedding blood. It eventually gets what it wants. **  
  
**Because Henry is hollow and hungry and wants to dissolve in someone who can offer him absolution; and in a quite obvious way this someone becomes the first person who calls him holy ( & puts a gun in his hand). **  
  
**So, while the church and the school and the town get swallowed by fire, he weaves lilies into his hair and makes a new religion with only a move of his lips and so he feasts.


	5. cameras pt. I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **tw:** u know... usual but mild outlast stuff
> 
> outlast au hell yea

Henry’s lungs are full of black smoke. That would prolly be a great metaphor for his self-destructive habits or acquired lack of empathy or, you know, stuff like that. Sadly enough, this is the realest fact on earth and sometimes when he opens his mouth it breathes that black smoke, and then it all goes ugly. The detriments of sharing a body, guys! The detriments of sharing a body; and he knew that’s something that would suck, but to know and to have are two different things still. It’s all like yeah sure, I - we - don’t have to eat anymore or sleep or drink, these ain’t the worst things. But then again why are we hurling objects at people and ripping them apart with only a force-power of mind?  
  
Jesus fucking Christ in who Jekyll never believed anyway! What kind of bastard settled in him in that godforsaken asylum?!  
  
You know how it is. Sometimes you see things and they fuck you (up) and then you no longer see things because you close your eyes. Henry chose to close his eyes waaaay too fucking late and got what he deserved - bloodied stubs of fingers and (this time truly metaphorical) glowing neon sign all over his face, PTSD. If the first are now replaced by ghostly fingers of same black smoke (Henry hasn’t been left much vocabulary, forgive him), the second is gonna be a stumbling-block of many years ahead. It’s not that bad, though. Hey, he killed a few folks, who didn’t, in this economy? He also saved a cat.  
  
He has this fantasy of sorts, let’s call it a power fantasy. He wants to be good and shrink into a tiny black dot and then he wants to throw himself into the sun. Is that too dramatic for you? Well, forgive him once again. He’s sharing a body. Duh.  
  
Persistent in refusing any kind of help, Jekyll finds consolation in not remembering much anyway. Like, before the actual asylum, though. That’s not really helpful at all, huh. It’s something. It’s enough. And even when that guy - you know, _that_ guy, the guy who lured him into the fucking psych ward and who saved him both at the same time, the guy who makes amazing pancakes but drives like he’s chasing gods, the guy for whom Henry’d break the world because hey that’s what lovers do. So yeah when that guy says “bro let’s maybe find ourselves a therapist”, Jekyll kindly offers him to fuck off; and then they don’t talk for a week or so, but it’s still better than listening to some shit of some prof. He gets thrown on the streets though, and so, just like an idiot he is, he stands in the pouring rain for hours upon hours and exhales this black smoke and thinks “wow, I’m such an egotist”, but it’s not like he’s planning on changing. He’s planning - in a week, mind it - on going back home into their small apartment, throwing the cat on his lap and burying nose in Edward’s shoulder and turning on the TV and watching some useless crap. And that’s his fucking therapy.


	6. cameras pt. II

One thing Henry knows for sure is that he’d be a terrible buzzkill. Not that he already isn’t, you know. For instance, once on a very sunny day he was invited to his former best friend’s - what was his name again, Robin, Robert? - birthday party and just having gotten there he already ruined everything. To these days that doesn’t bother him much, it’s like hello yeah good morning it’s the party’s owner who decided to re-join, why on earth would it be his, Henry’s, fault? The freckled bitch should’ve known what he signs up for. Jekyll remembers sheer fucking nothing from their times together, he’s sharing a body now, and not many things matter. Not many things and absolutely not many folks.  
  
Fine, to be entirely honest, let’s just say the only person who somehow matters is that guy, well _that_ guy, you remember, right? His name is pure honey on Jekyll’s tongue. Edward was all so “I’m getting you out of here” and all so “you can stay at my place for now, I guess” and all so “wow you dick and you just killed five people but hey you saved a cat, let’s go home”; and of hecking course ( ~~they fucked~~ ) this poor red-eyed idiot had no choice but to immediately throw himself in love. By the deepest veins hidden in his body, he knows that the black bastard that lives inside him approves that choice of soulmate too - it comes out more and more often, and Edward is never scared of it. That’s something new, Henry thinks; and also he thinks oh heaven and hell, I’d kill much more than five people for you.  
  
When they find his mother and sister who the ill-fated company behind the psych ward tried to hide from all the world, Edward pushes Jekyll to meet them, much to Jekyll’s quite panicked “NOOOOOOOOOO”. That’s a bit weird, huh? Who wouldn’t want to meet their relatives after losing memory? Well, the answer here is obvious. Fucked up dudes with nothing but black smoke in their lungs. Over a lovely family dinner, Jekyll gets to know two things. First - Edward Hyde, that guy who almost got brainwashed and raped and decapitated in the Mount-Massive asylum, wants revenge and already searches for the ways to find it. Second - Jekyll’s sister could help them too.  
  
Second doesn’t matter. Back at a cheap hotel room, Jekyll and Hyde argue and argue and argue and it ends with Henry losing calm and becoming this mass of black goo/smoke/dust/underline whatever applicable. This mass throws a knife and this knife slashes Edward’s hand and this Edward shuts the door before this mass’ very eyes. A few hours under cold night skies, this mass becomes Jekyll and Jekyll thinks what the fuck and Jekyll thinks I’m not gonna let him do that and finally Jekyll thinks if he’s going to hell, I’m going to hell with him.  
  
Don’t worry. So far, this story has a happy ending; after all, not many things matter. They find a volunteering organization of hackers and reporters, trying to bring truth to the surface. These people shrug off Henry sharing a body - they’ve seen worse. And when Edward wants to leave him hanging out with family, mother and sister and whoever, Henry says “please don’t go, _you’re my family_ ” (and later Edward breaks down crying). They don’t have to talk through triggers. Jekyll doesn’t have them. Hyde would bite to blood on any offers to wear a dress. He’s still doing so much better keeping it together and not lying facedown on the floor, staring at a wall.  
  
Sometimes when Jekyll remembers what’s become of them both, he gets angry. Sometimes - numb. Sometimes he just thinks fuck it. His fingers can hold a camera again. He doesn’t care about revenge or family or shit, really, but he cares for one person. It’s something. It’s enough.  
  
I’m going to throw you into the sun myself - sighs Edward, rubbing his eyes sleepily - If you won’t immediately stop howling serenades under the windows of this hotel room and go to bed.


End file.
